A Little Romance: Stories for Hopeful Hearts Page 9

  Some of the herbs she sold to herbalists so they could make their concoctions—things like soap and tinctures and balms. The herbalists required strict growing methods so they could label their products organic. That required natural fertilizers on her part, which she didn’t mind . . . well, she didn’t mind the idea, but the smell of those was a different matter.

  Lyda had a standing arrangement with the neighbor’s goats down the road, and also the lady further out in the country who raised chickens (humanely) for the eggs. In fact, those chickens and goats were almost like pets to them, but what came out of their back ends smelled just as bad as—well, you can imagine.

  Commercial fertilizers required special equipment and masks, but Lyda only required a shovel and garden fork to work the stuff in. And with these, while a mask was optional, she found that she still usually wanted one. Sometimes the neighbors complained about the smell too, but they never refused when she brought over some of the produce.

  In her small greenhouse, she grew things for cooking too: tomatoes, basil, oregano, sage and cilantro. Just outside in big terracotta pots were onions and garlic and things that otherwise might spread—mints mostly, but also some flowering things that were pretty, but not really useful.

  She liked the names though: sweet woodruff, Johnny-jump-ups, candytuft and ground phlox.

  The garden was her refuge from all things technical. Lyda worked with medical machines: calibrating them, testing them, upgrading them, and repairing them too when somebody could. Otherwise, the machines would have to be replaced at great cost, and she had been accused of being a Godsend when it came to fixing them.

  She had a knack, it was true, but that was just a skill that anyone could learn. Lyda admired the others who worked in those medical places much more than they admired her. She was close enough to the patients to know she could never be a regular medical technician, not to mention a doctor or nurse or paramedic.

  She had sympathy, but also a weak stomach for people in trouble—especially those in pain. Lyda always considered that a bit of cowardice on her part, but at least she was doing something to help . . . for a very good salary.

  If she felt guilty for that sometimes, she had to remind herself that someone had to do it, and she had to make a living too. And while she understood the machines better than people, Lyda understood her garden better than anything else in the world . . . understood everything, that is, except for her roses—they were not happy here.

  They were actually her mother’s roses; this house had been in the family since her great-grandfather built it. Lyda’s own grandmother had been born upstairs (but thankfully she didn’t know which room, as that sounded a bit . . . messy).

  The house was in a style people called Victorian, and the ornateness of the exterior was fussy to her. She preferred her manmade surroundings with clean and simple lines, and then she’d fill it with plants and animals to make clutter of a whole different kind. Still she didn’t change much when she inherited it all—just new paint, better windows and roof repairs.

  It reminded her too much of her family—the way they had been—for her to change anything else.

  Inside, over the mantel of the sitting room, an old painting of the place in grander days showed that the garden had once been one of those restrictive English monstrosities, with strictly carved hedges and geometric shapes and everything ruthlessly trimmed and neat paths set in.

  Her grandmother had torn all that out when she married a rich man who agreed to come to live in the town as part of the bargain to win her hand in matrimony. Lyda’s grandmother was quite a looker, according to the portraits and photos here and there. Lyda knew the stories too:

  Many men had adored the young debutante, it was said. Lyda pictured her grandmother wearing long skirts of light colors and elaborate construction. The clothes would be made of satin, taffeta, faille, moiré, and silk poplin, which almost sounded like the names of plants instead of cloth.

  Her grandmother, of course, was an only daughter, and also the youngest child. She would have had her choice of several suitors to pick from, but only those carefully culled by the parents, like culling bad fruit from the orchard crop.

  Fact is, that lovely young woman’s father (Lyda’s great grandfather) had been an admiral and was quite formidable by all accounts. The man got even surlier when he retired and had to stay on solid ground.

  Back in those days, a man asked the father for his daughter’s hand in marriage, and if he didn’t have a good family and plenty of prospects to back him up, he need not have bothered to make any offer at all.

  Lyda only knew all that because she spent a lot of time with her grandmother when she was growing up—because her mother went through so many men. That sounded worse than it was, but it was something the old woman said time and again. Lyda sometimes thought that maybe her grandmother had been jealous of modern times.

  It was only when Lyda got older that she realized what her grandmother had meant: Lyda’s mother had been married repeatedly, but at least married more times than divorced, which meant she died a married woman, not a widow or a divorcee.

  Even so, none of that would have happened in the Admiral’s day, and he wouldn’t have allowed that for his sons and daughter. No divorces. No remarriages for women either. Men—well, that was a different story. Hadn’t it always been that way?

  Not that he had sons left by the time her grandmother accepted the life partner of choice. All the sons had all succumbed to one war or another. For all the restrictions and judgments and tragedies, Lyda’s mother and grandmother had both remained optimists.

  Lyda never understood where it came from, but she was happy to acknowledge that they had passed it on.

  It came in handy: By the time Lyda had grown up, most of her grandmother’s fortune had been spent on the house. The justification was given whether anyone asked it or not: This would be her home as it had been for generations before, and so this house and grounds would be her inheritance—therefore, it was an investment in the future.

  It was a socially acceptable way of saying that her grandmother could spend her money just how she wanted.

  None of the other executors of the Admiral’s family trust had the gumption to stand up to Lyda’s grandmother, it seems, and so all Lyda had left when the rest of her family had passed was the house and garden.

  Her grandmother, it was said, was even better with the notion of a green thumb than Lyda was, but in those days, servants were more likely to do the work out back. She suspected that her grandmother wouldn’t be happy with that, though wouldn’t mind passing on some of the unpleasant tasks like working with manure or pulling particularly stubborn weeds or digging out new flowerbeds.

  The view from the master bedroom balcony looked out over these grounds, and while the lands all around had been sold off over the decades to pay for things like modernization of the house with new plumbing and bathrooms and proper wiring for electricity too, the garden was still a good size right now.

  Some might actually call it large, but she had different standards. No, Lyda had no complaints, even though her grandmother had spent a large part of the fortune on the money pit that could pass for a Victorian museum—Lyda too now called it home and had for some time.

  Of course, her love of the house and garden had started long before Lyda was an adult and knew what money was for. She didn’t understand her mother’s complaints then, or her grandmother’s disappointment in failed expectations.

  Things were going much better for her than they had for her mother. Lyda liked her job, she loved her garden—she was a lucky person all the way round . . . except for her mother’s roses.

  It should have been a caution that her grandmother had never planted any to begin. Her mother though was not so attentive to the obvious and planted the first few after she left her first husband, Lyda’s father. The grandmother let her, Lyda assumed, because it kept her mother busy.

  In fact, her mother had explained the same: “
It kept me busy, dear, and every hole I dug, I imagined it was to bury him in.”

  ~~~

  Lyda didn’t remember her father. He had visitation rights, it was true, but seldom took advantage. At first she was too young for him to take her home by himself—him being a single man in the city and always at work. Later, he seemed to have forgotten about his little girl. He never came around to the house, but sometimes on holidays, he’d call, but that didn’t last long.

  And he always forgot her birthday.

  Lyda’s grandmother and mother would pretend something they’d bought themselves came from her father. It would be wrapped elaborately with a little card attached that said “Love, Dad,” but she knew. She never admitted to knowing, given the trouble they took. Besides, she’d also have to admit that she’d been snooping where she shouldn’t have been.

  Her mother married again within a year and was divorced again just as quickly. His name was Ralph, and he had been Lyda’s father’s best man at the wedding, as they’d known each other since high school.

  Ralph, it was said, had been crying during that first ceremony just like some of the women who attended. Lyda figured it was because maybe Ralph had always been in love with her mother, so marrying her after the divorce . . . well . . . that was romantic, wasn’t it?

  Her grandmother said it was because Ralph really was the better man, and he also came from a good family, which was not supposedly true of Lyda’s dad. In fact, her grandmother said that repeatedly right up until the time Ralph got drunk one night and wrapped his arms around Lyda’s father and planted a big kiss right smack—

  The story never went beyond that, but her mother went to her divorce lawyer the very next day, leaving Ralph to move out all his things with the help of the servants so it could go all the quicker. When coming home, her mother stopped at the plant nursery to buy a few more roses for the back garden.

  Her mother also went back to the plant nursery over and over again for this or that, and eventually when her divorce was through, she married the man who owned that too. He told Lyda to call him Uncle Bill when the happy couple got home after the elopement. Uncle Bill was a pleasant man who looked to be quite a bit older than her mother and smelled a bit like crop-dust.

  Lyda’s grandmother just glared between the two of them; they’d been newlyweds only a few days by then. The old woman didn’t yell or scold, just made a sound like a grunt—but wasn’t one, because ladies don’t do that, of course.

  He came to live in the house with them just like Ralph had and worked in the garden out back quite a bit, though Ralph had never done that at all. Ralph didn’t like to get dirty and spent far more time with Lyda’s grandmother playing card games like pinochle and whist than with Lyda or her mother.

  Things went rather well—calm and uneventful for a few months until it was almost a year. Then it came softly, the change, but only at first—arguments. They began at night and then came during the day, and eventually got louder too: Lyda began to hear Uncle Bill and her mother arguing about how he was not a servant, and shouldn’t be treated like a hired hand getting orders from Lyda’s grandmother.

  Her mother would yell back, “Then stop acting like one, stand up to her, man!”

  It might have been too late by then, as Lyda’s grandmother had taken on the role of matriarch with a mean vengeance. She wasn’t really a manipulative old dragon like many people thought. Lyda’s grandmother was a sweet woman who loved her home and daughter, though sometimes wanted to ‘wring her neck.’

  She only said that when the servants weren’t about, and when she was talking only to Lyda and her dolls over tea—most times make-believe tea, but sometimes a mixture of lemonade and tea (half and half). Her grandmother called it Russian tea, and was one of her grandmother’s favorite things.

  Even with the complaints and the threats, Lyda took that to mean that the old woman cared for all of them. Still, it amused the old woman to act the part like she was one of those old dowagers in a Charles Dickens novel—the Victorian woman of standing, always getting her way.

  It seems that her grandmother was also a bit of an actress—or had wanted to be one in her day. That wasn’t allowed by the Admiral, but Lyda’s mother was also good at playing a part, because Lyda could certainly tell when her mother was just acting happy.

  The poor plant nurseryman didn’t stand a chance. He meant well, and he was a kind man. But he married above his station, her grandmother claimed, and those kinds of men never last long. If he had any worth, he would have made a fortune first, and only then come to call on Lyda’s mother. It was a common argument from the old woman, and the mismatch ended with the predictable results:

  They’d argue. He’d storm out of the house and come back again when it was long past dark.

  But one night, he didn’t come back at all. Her mother was actually quite worried and called the county sheriff when the town police said they could do nothing about that.

  She called the local hospitals next. It wasn’t an accident, nothing like that. Instead, he had flown to Reno, Nevada, for what her mother called an annulment, because it hadn’t been a whole year yet.

  At least it wasn’t another divorce. Lyda didn’t know then that it was pretty much the same thing. Strangely after that though, her mother and Uncle Bill remained friends. When the woman needed someone to talk to, she’d go see Uncle Bill, or call him on the phone. Sometimes, they’d talk for hours like two teenagers in love.

  It never went beyond that though, and Lyda sometimes wondered what was going on. Maybe her mother just needed a friend, and maybe Uncle Bill was still in love. People do interesting things when they are lonely—Lyda knew that first hand.

  ~~~

  The plant nursery in town was still owned by the same family, though Uncle Bill’s nephew, Chester, ran it now. A few years after the annulment, Uncle Bill finally married a widow with several kids. Lyda knew her mother went to the wedding, but was not invited to stay for the reception.

  Was the new bride jealous then? Could have been, as her mother was still quite a looker.

  Uncle Bill and his new family then moved to Oklahoma to live with his new wife’s oldest son who worked in the oil fields. Lyda couldn’t help but wonder about how that went, given the difference in climate and what the plants there must have been. She had seen pictures too: Here it was green and lush, there it was dry and not.

  People do interesting things when it came to affairs of the heart—she’d read that since in some self-help book. And they’d talked about it too, Lyda and Uncle Bill’s nephew, who was a chatty man who was soft in the middle and always smelled like donuts.

  While Chester didn’t seem to hold a grudge concerning their shared family past, he was terribly curious about the whole affair, and was given to gossip about all sorts of things. It was harmless banter, and she didn’t want to be rude, so ended up spending more time than she planned at the nursery whenever she went.

  She also ended up telling Chester things that she hadn’t meant to, things she had bottled up for years. At first she chided herself all the way home whenever it happened, but gradually she took some of her grandmother’s wisdom to heart. Talking to Chester, telling him things was like cleaning out the rain gutters of the old house.

  But still, sometimes it hurt to remember . . .

  ~~~

  When Lyda was nine, her father died of a heart attack, supposedly chasing his secretary around his desk. That’s what her mother said, and Lyda barely recognized the smiling man in the giant photo at the funeral. She had to admit, her father was a handsome man, but other than that, she had no impression of grief or regret.

  That was not true of several lovely women—women all younger than her mother. They sat scattered and crying around the funeral parlor’s cheap excuse for a chapel that would look just at home in the interior of a doublewide trailer.

  Her mother had planted roses after all her marriages ended, but after that funeral, a funny thing happened: Her mother gave u
p in the garden and instead started going out with strange men who came to the house to pick her up, but rarely came in. Mostly only roared into the circular drive with their sport cars and honk their horns or rev their engines.

  Her mother had never really done dating before—not even with her other husbands: Her mother had known both of those men for years before she married them.

  The few men, still strangers, who did have the manners to come to the front door were put in the front parlor, weren’t allowed into the rest of her grandmother’s house. Her mother started staying out until late hours, and sometimes wouldn’t come home at all.

  Meanwhile, the roses were hanging on, but not thriving. The gardeners that her grandmother still employed were not optimistic. They worked around them still, putting in borders of hedges to mark the boundaries of the yard. They put in running water for birdbaths and paving stone paths. It was beginning to look more like that formal Victorian garden again—one that Lyda didn’t like.

  She heard the servants talking though: Her grandmother was trying to recall her youth, making the garden be just like when she was young way back when.

  That seemed terribly sad; it seemed like the only control her grandmother had anymore. Lyda’s grandmother would sit in the master bedroom balcony, looking down on the progress with concern.

  The gardeners who all spoke another language would talk about her grandmother too. Lyda remembered the words and tried to look them up; all she found were terms like spider or harpy or something that translated to the watching place.

  Those men never did move the roses though, just designed the garden around them. They tried their best to make them grow, but in the end, suggested that they had to go. Her grandmother always said no, that the roses were the only part of the garden that her mother had been a part of, and of all the things there, those meant the most.